Manage Your Energy: Are You Engaged or Unengaged?
As we free up more time and increase our per-hour output, we can easily exhaust our physical, mental and emotional energy by working longer and harder. To help manage our energy, blogger Penelope Trunk suggests re-imagining our time by splicing it into engaged time vs. unengaged time:
People actually don’t mind working long hours when they are engaged. Burnout is not a result of how much work you’re doing but what type of work you’re doing. So instead of organizing time into work time and personal time, you could organize it into time when you like what you’re doing and time when you don’t like what you’re doing. This is actually my big gripe with Tim Ferriss. He says he only works a 4 -hour week, but he really means he only does four hours a week of work that is not engaging to him.
And as the gray area between work and life becomes ever murkier, this can be a great mindset to help find your balance. If you have high-pressure life events that can’t be avoided, it might be a good idea to reschedule that big presentation or huge project deadline for another day (or vice versa).
